1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to methods and apparatuses for supporting the movement of a user doing exercises or playing games.
2. Description of the Related Art
As people become more interested in becoming healthy and doing sports and make better use of leisure time, an increasing number of people are doing exercises including walking, jogging, various types of fitness programs, or various dances, or playing computer games or the like. Proposals have been made for methods and apparatuses for assisting or supporting doing such exercises or playing such games.
Specifically, a method of detecting the athletic strength of a test subject, which serves as an index of athletic performance of the test subject, by taking into consideration the test subject's comprehensive physical strength, and informing the test subject of the athletic strength is described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 10-290854.
In Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication 2001-257746, a device for detecting vibrations made by walking and, on the basis of detected vibration information, computing the number of steps or the distance walked is described.
It is described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2002-272890 in which, when a user does a fitness program inside the house using a so-called “aero bike”, which is a fixed bicycle, a virtual environment is created where the user feels as if the user were riding the bicycle outdoors.
It is described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2005-156641 in which, when a user is walking while listening to music, the playback speed of the music is adjusted to the walking tempo of the user.